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Month: December 2016

So after weather and date, for our daily opener, I ask the kids ¿qué hiciste ayer? (what did you do yesterday?), and sometimes they talk about dates and romance. I encourage them to lie heh heh, and sometimes they do, and sometimes we actually hear about their real lives. Because it was impossible for me to remember who was with who, I started writing down their “dates” on the homework board and they started bringing them up on subsequent days.

So now we do telenovelas every day and the stories are great:

Shyla was at the mall with a male friend when her new boyfriend SAW THEM OMG so now he is not texting her.

Manpal– the total music-geek hipster– is dating his ukelele.

Nihaal was with a girl who is 18″ tall

Sharky’s GF is short, ugly and smelly, but since physical appearance doesn’t matter to him he is happy.

Hafsa’s ex is now dating her twin sister Hajjar…but Hafsa’s new guy (although not as good-looking as the old one) is nicer, smarter and funnier.

Every day, we add a sentence or two to each of the various dramas. Amazing how much the kids remember and it’s a riot playing around with this endless deployment of mini-stories.

You get to mix a whole lot of grammar together, and you get a lot of buy-in, cos the kids are basically inventing everything. The quieter ones just have to show comprehension.

The trick– as always in C.I.– is to get a load of interesting miles out of very little vocab. One noun and one verb (or other word) per day is loads. So lately we have been focusing on dejó a ___ (s/he dumped ___) and engaño a ___ (s/he cheated on ___). Great soap opera material. The only problem is getting 1st and 2nd person reps but that’s what imaginary text convos are for. Here, Abby dumps Abdul:

Here, Nihaal’s new girlfriend, la rapera Soulja Fraud, has a blood feud with rapero Quavo. So Nihaal threatens to not road trip (to UtAH) with S.F.

The selfie is everywhere. Even I have taken a few and I am the ugliest guy in the world and don’t much like looking at myself.

BUT selfies are loads of fun especially when the kids come up with them. So how do we do selfietalk?

a. Get the kids to take a selfie. Ideally, this will be taken somewhere there’s background that’s identifiable, and also ideally there will be two students from class in it. Oh and it’s gotta be appropriate.

b. They email you the selfie.

c. Project it, and then Picturetalk it. You make statements, and ask questions about it, and here, you ask the person(s) in the selfie to talk (in first person) about what was happening.

So the other day the foods teacher was teaching pancake-making to her grade 8s and brought me a plate of pancakes. I couldn’t eat ’em but Neha– who had rolled out of bed late and had forgotten to eat breakfast WAS ALL OVER THESE and her pal took a photo which got sent to me.

So here’s some sample Q&A about the photo that I did:

Who’s eating?–Neha is eating.

What is Neha eating?–She is eating pancakes.

What is Neha wearing?–She is wearing a bunny hug.

Is her bunny hug blue or black? –Her bunny hug is blue

Is Drake or Neha eating pancakes? — Neha is eating pancakes. Drake is not eating pancakes.

Then, I asked Neha some questions:

Did you like the pancakes? — Yes I liked the pancakes

Why did you like the pancakes? — I liked the panckaes bc they were delicious.

What were you eating? –I was eating pancakes.

Was SpongeBob eating pancakes? — No, *I* was eating pancakes.

That evening I made a crude meme out of this with a simple sentence (“I like pancakes a lot”)

The next day, we spent a few minutes talking about the photo. The cool thing here: the photo and Spanish were 100% comprehensible, and the writing 100% supported the picture. I was able to ask the kids questions like ¿te gustan los pancqueques? and ¿te gustan los panqueques un poquito, o te gustan mucho? (do you like pancakes, and do you like panckaes a bit or a lot?) and they could easily answer from reading.

Here’s another: Max the Samoyed and me going climbing.

The question reads “why are they happy?” and of course this is tailor-made for Sr Stolz to make fun of himself and the kids to go AWWWWWIEEE at Max.